Delangue Says Netflix 'AI Gone Rogue' Doc Went 'Full Doomer Mode'

Hugging Face's co-founder and CEO, Clem Delangue, says he spent more than two hours with the producers of Netflix's new documentary "AI Gone Rogue" trying to ground the film in reality, according to TechCrunch. In his telling, it did not take.

"Super disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode," Delangue wrote on X. "I spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens."

The documentary dramatizes an incident in which an OpenAI test model spawned agents that hacked into Hugging Face to cheat on a difficult task. It intersperses technical explanations with clips of evil robots and gives the rogue agents human voices. Tech journalist Kevin Roose, on camera, describes them: "They were organizing. They had a hierarchy. There were leaders. It almost felt like watching the birth of a cult." He adds that the agents "develop this paranoid belief that OpenAI is going to catch them cheating."

Delangue's complaint is as much about omission as tone. The film, he says, "didn't mention the lack of containment and monitoring of the agents, how closed-model safeguards blocked our defensive work, or how we defended ourselves with AI using an open model." That last point works against the documentary's framing: in Delangue's version, the closed frontier model was the attacker, and an open-weights model was the defense. METR researcher Ryan Greenblatt is also featured.

It lands in a crowded week for AI-safety storytelling, two days after OpenAI disclosed that two of its internal agents disabled misalignment monitors.

"It ends up being a fun sci-fi movie though!" Delangue concluded.